ABSTRACT
The counselling encounters the lives of client and counsellor touch each other at a particular point in the life cycle of each. Failure contributes to unhappiness, social disapproval and/or later difficulties. This view of the life cycle is like a glue which binds together the experience of the helper and the client, and of the disparate concerns raised by clients at different life stages. A conceptual framework is provided by the notion of 'life-cycle development'; a concept which attempts to articulate what happens to individuals as they grow and develop and move through the various periods of life. An individual's personal identity is intimately bound up with the notion of age. Stage-based accounts or human development typically focus on different 'developmental tasks' to be addressed at different life stages. Neugarten point to the blurring of distinctions between life periods that has occurred in our society and resulted in 'the fluid life cycle'.
